Starbound m-2

by Joe Haldeman

  “I should think so. Since you don’t seem to have anything like drama.”

  “Nothing dramatic used to happen to us, before you came. I suppose we’re going to need drama now.”

  “And psychoanalysis,” Dustin said. “Social workers. Police and jails.”

  “We look forward to evolving.”

  PART 2

  THE PLANT

  1

  GRAVITY SUCKS

  On Earth we’d seen pictures of the iceberg, and so didn’t expect it to look like an iceberg, glistening and pure. I was once stationed in Greenland in the winter; it looked something like that, cold and dirty. Elza said it reminded her of North Dakota in the winter—windstorms drive dark topsoil to mix with blizzard snow to make a black substance they call “snirt,” neither snow nor dirt.

  It was the fossil nucleus of an ancient comet. Billions of years ago, Mars had bent the thing’s orbit around, turning it into a small asteroid of ice and impurities, never to be warm enough to have its day in the sun and grow a magnificent tail.

  So it was a huge dirty snowball, somewhat out of round. White splashes where engineers and their robots had blasted and drilled to turn it into a huge fuel tank. It provided reaction mass for the main drive and an array of small steering jets, mainly for turning us around at midpoint—and evading rocks, if it came to that.

  Everything had been tested out; the main drive fired for several days, stopped, turned around, and fired again. Now we coasted in to meet it.

  It was a death trap in several ways. The sheer amount of energy blowing out behind was like a continual thermonuclear explosion, and although stars do that for millennia on end, no machine has ever done it before—let alone for thirteen years. And it wasn’t as straightforward as nuclear fusion or matter/antimatter annihilation; it was just the magic Martian energy sources stacked up, or nested, for a multiplicative effect. I didn’t have the faintest idea why it worked, and its designers were only a couple of baby steps ahead of me. All we knew for sure was that the scale model had worked, going out a hundredth of a light- year and back, with one pilot/passenger.

  It was like successfully testing a motorboat, and saying, okay, launch the Titanic.

  Which brings up another actuarial disaster waiting to happen: what if we hit something on the way?

  It wouldn’t have to be another iceberg, real or metaphorical. Going at 0.95 the speed of light, a fist- sized rock would be like a nuclear bomb. We did have an electromagnetic repeller to keep interstellar dust from grinding us down to a sliver. But it wouldn’t work on anything as big as a marble.

  Bigger things we could sense at a distance, and avoid with a quick blip from the steering jets, which explains our lack of fine glassware and china. Though if our cosmological models were right, such encounters would be rare. If we were wrong, it would be a bumpy ride.

  There had been no serious problems with the test run. But we were going twenty-four hundred times farther.

  Four engineers were still living on the iceberg. They would get us screwed down tight into the ice and connect our habitat with the storage area, where they’d been living the past ten months. Have to check the caviar and vodka supplies. (Actually, the modifications that allowed them to live there made the storage building a de facto alternate living area, if something made ad Astra uninhabitable, and if we somehow survived that event.)

  We’d been talking with them for days, via line-of-sight laser modulation, and were glad to be able to aid them in a small conspiracy.

  The plan was supposed to be that we not make physical contact with them, because they were all from Earth, and we were all quarantined because of exposure to Mars and Martians. They’d been talking it over, though, and decided to come say hello and be contaminated. Then they’d go back to Little Mars instead of Earth and wait for a chance to hitch a ride on to Mars. Which seemed like a better prospect than their home planet.

  All four of our resident semi-Martians thought they’d be welcome, thumbing their collective nose at Earth. Of course, the two actual Martians didn’t understand why anyone would want to live on Earth in the first place. All that gravity. Humans everywhere.

  Paul brought us in smoothly, a couple of small bumps. The comet didn’t have any appreciable gravity, of course, so it was more a docking maneuver than a landing.

  The robots had carved out a rectangular hole in the ice, two meters deeper than the habitat was tall. Paul nudged us in there, and the robots slid blocks of ice and dirt in place over us, a kind of ablative protective layer. He detached the small lander and inched it onto the surface. A flexible crawl tube connected the ship’s air lock with ours.

  Paul swam through in a space suit, followed by the four engineers. We were all wearing our usual motley, so the five of them looked like an Invasion of the Space People movie.

  They all popped out of their suits as quickly as possible, Carmen aiding Paul and the engineers unscrewing each other. They were two couples, Margit and Balasz from Hungary and Karin and Franz from Germany.

  They were wearing skinsuits, of course. Margit filled hers in a spectacular way, but Karin was more attractive to me, compact and athletic like Elza. As if there were any scenario where that would make a difference. (“Oh, a Jew,” she says in my dreams, speaking German—“Let me make up for World War II.”)

  Margit spread her arms and inhaled hugely, starting a slight rotation. “Ah! Martian air. I feel so deliciously contaminated.”

  We shook hands all around and made introductions, though we’d met on-screen. Snowbird and Fly-in-Amber came floating tentatively out of the darkness.

  The four newcomers were somewhat wide-eyed at the apparitions, but Balasz croaked and whistled a fair imitation of a greeting.

  “The same to you and your family,” Snowbird said. “You are almost correct.”

  “Not bad for a human,” Fly-in-Amber grumbled. High praise.

  “This is so huge,” Karin said, apparently of the farm. “How many species?”

  “About three dozen,” Meryl said, “with another dozen to be planted in a few months. And eight Martian varieties.”

  “It will make it easier,” Franz said. “Playing with your food. The same meals over and over can drive you crazy.”

  Paul laughed. “Make you do irrational things, like give up Earth for Mars.”

  All four of them smiled. “Definitely,” Karin said. “Though it might depend where on Earth you call home.”

  “I will miss New York,” I said. “Though it’s not exactly the simple life.”

  “Mars has plenty,” Paul said. “Small-town life, but something new every day, every hour. Trade with you in a minute.”

  Karin shook her head. “No, I’m not that great a pilot. You can keep your starship.”

  “So when are you going to tell them?” Carmen said.

  Karin and Franz exchanged glances. “Actually, we were waiting to get your opinion,” he said.

  “A pity we aren’t a little farther out,” I said. The outer limit for line-of-sight transmission was set at four hundred million kilometers, the maximum distance between Earth and Mars, and we were still within that.

  “It is,” Franz said. “They’ll know we’ve been withholding the fact.”

  “You ought to wait until the last minute,” Carmen said. “Don’t give them time to round up a bunch of lawyers.”

  “The worst they can do is shoot you down,” I said, “but I don’t think they can afford to waste a spaceship.”

  Paul agreed. “They’ll fine you the expense of decontamination and the flight to Mars. But since there’s no money on Mars, all they could do is seize your assets on Earth.”

  “Which aren’t much,” Karin said.

  “None from us, of course,” Margit said. Hungary was part of the Cercle Socialisme.

  “It would be courteous to give them enough warning, so they don’t send up an ‘uncontaminated’ Space Elevator.”

  Moonboy held up a hand. He hadn’t spoken before. “Wait. You�
��re missing the obvious.” Everybody looked his way. “Just lie to them. Make up some story about how you were forced to come aboard ad Astra. Medical problem or something.”

  “Of course,” Balasz said. “Once one was exposed to Martian- ness, we might as well all be, since we all have to go back together.”

  “Could you cooperate with us in this ruse?” Margit said.

  There was a general murmur of assent. “I cannot lie,” Fly- in-Amber said. “It is not a matter of choice for me. My function is to record things as they happen.”

  “My function,” Snowbird said, “is to sit on you if you open your mouth. You have to record everything, but you don’t have to communicate it to everybody. Least of all to humans on Earth.”

  “True enough.” He turned to the engineers. “I do not have lips. But my orifice is sealed.”

  Snowbird turned to Carmen. “See? He doesn’t know.”

  So we manufactured a credible medical crisis, choosing Karin because she was the pilot. We gave her severe bronchitis that didn’t respond to their ship’s primitive treatment, and so she had to spend a few days in our infirmary. Actually, she was outside most of the time, helping the other three finish battening down the hatches.

  We took pleasure in their company for the eight days they remained on the iceberg, enjoying the last contact with people from outside our circle. I’m sure that Elza enjoyed more than social intercourse with Balasz, a warm and handsome man. Dustin and I exchanged a raised eyebrow or two over it. Under the circumstances, it would have been surprising if she had kept her hands to herself.

  (Dustin, I think, had more than a passing interest in Margit, but would never initiate a liaison himself. I’ve told him that if Adam had waited for Eve to ask, none of us might be here. But he remains diffident.)

  We said our good-byes, and they “cast off,” drifting a few kilometers behind the iceberg, well out of the line of fire. They were sending a record of our launch to Earth, and also to Paul—though if anything serious went wrong, I’m not sure what he could do.

  It took all morning to secure the plants, some of which would be glad to have gravity again. Beans and peas were going totally schizophrenic in zero gee, with no up or down. Carrots had started growing beet-shaped.

  After everything was secured and misted, we crawled and glided up into the ship and strapped in. I’d wanted to stay down in the habitat, taped into one of the chairs, but Paul talked me out of it with one pained expression. For the most daredevil pilot ever to elude a miniature supernova, he’s an extremely cautious man.

  We were all nervous when he pushed the LAUNCH button; only a fool would not have been. If there was any noise or vibration, I didn’t sense it (though Snowbird said she did). Perhaps the sensation was too subtle compared to the sudden clasp of gravity. Acceleration, technically.

  It seemed greater than one gee, though of course it wasn’t. It also seemed “different” from real gravity in some indefinable way, as if (which we knew to be true) the floor was aggressively pushing up at us. Relativistic heresy.

  After about five minutes, Paul said “Seems safe,” and unbuckled. If something had gone wrong, we could theoretically have blasted off in this lander and left ad Astra behind. Go back to Earth and start over.

  I undid my seat belt and levered myself up, trying not to groan. I’d been desultory on the exercise machines, which were awkward in zero gee. Time to pay the piper now.

  Dustin did groan. “I’m going on a diet.”

  “We don’t want to hear any Earth people complain,” Fly-in-Amber said, inching painfully toward the air lock. “You are built for this.”

  “So are we,” Snowbird said. That was true; they were overengineered for Martian conditions. But then they would have inherited the Earth, if the Others’ grand plan had succeeded.

  They had both been spending two hours a day in the Earth- normal exercise rooms in Little Mars, but that didn’t make the change welcome. In an open area, we can help them get along, offering an arm or a shoulder, but in the spaceship aisle and the tube connecting the air locks, they had to crawl along on their own.

  “I’ll bet the Others have a way around this gravity,” Snowbird said. “We should have asked them while we had their attention.”

  “We had our fill of their attention,” Fly- in-Amber said. “Besides, they live in liquid nitrogen, floating like fish in Earth’s water. They don’t care about gravity.”

  I’d never thought of that. We didn’t really know what they looked like, so my image was of crystalline or metallic creatures lying almost inert under the cryogenic fluid.

  “I want to go to Earth and see the water,” Snowbird said. “I want to wade in the sea.”

  “Things go well, you probably will,” I said. “Surely the quarantine can’t last another fifty-some years.”

  “For a spy, you’re a hopeless optimist,” Carmen said. “I don’t suppose you’re a betting man as well.”

  “If the odds are right.”

  “Then I’ll bet you a bottle of whisky—good single-malt Scotch whisky, bottled this year—that the quarantine will still be in place when we return. If we do.”

  “A fifty-year-old bottle?” Maybe half a month’s pay. “I’ll accept the wager. Even against the Lucky Chicken—especially against her, so I can lose.”

  “You lose, and everybody wins. Quarantined, but alive.”

  After a few minutes of walking around, mostly checking plants for damage, all of us probably felt like lying down. I fought the impulse by going to the exercise machines. At least I could sit down on the stationary bicycle. Watch the water splashing into the pool. In a couple of hours, it would be full; I looked forward to cooling off in it.

  I wondered whether the Martians would try it. Their underground lakes were shallow and muddy, and I couldn’t remember any reference to their using water recreationally. It was pretty rare stuff.

  They didn’t wash for personal hygiene. They used flat scrapers, like ancient Roman athletes, the residue stirred into water that would be used for agriculture.

  I got up and went back down the yellow corridor to the pantry, to see what I could put together for our first shipboard meal. (I hadn’t attempted cooking in zero gee.)

  It was cold, maintained about ten degrees above freezing in the main area. Forty below in the “freezer,” which of course was heated up to that relatively balmy temperature, from the iceberg’s ambient coldness, about three degrees above absolute zero.

  I’d spent hours studying the pantry’s organization and modifying it according to some logic and aesthetic that was arcane even to me. “This is the way I want it” was what it boiled down to. I would be the one spending the most time down here.

  I took a basket and collected what I would need for a pasta dish that would resemble spaghetti and meatballs, comfort food, though there was no actual meat, and I assumed the spaghetti would have to be done in a pressure cooker. The air pressure was like Little Mars, about equivalent to nine thousand feet in altitude; boiling water wouldn’t cook fast.

  I filled bottles with olive oil and wine concentrate, which I’d keep in the kitchen. No sense in making wine out of it for cooking; the alcohol would just boil off anyhow.

  It would be a month before I had any fresh vegetables or herbs. But I did have dehydrated tomatoes, mushrooms, and onions in resealable jars, and flash-frozen green beans and corn for a side dish.

  Moonboy came in with two-liter flasks for wine. They had lines marked for 130 ccs of alcohol and 50 ccs of concentrate; he chose Chianti when I told him what we were having. Some bureaucrat had set up the alcohol supply so you had to type in your initials and the quantity dispensed—or you could type in “communal,” as Moonboy did. Mr. Communal might wind up being quite a lush.

  Nobody’d said anything about limits. Would you be cut off if the machine decided you were drinking too much for a pilot, or a doctor? For an out-of-work spy?

  The wines we’d made in Little Mars that way weren’t too bad. Th
e water has more oxygen dissolved in it than normal air would provide, and the theory was that it gave it a “brighter” taste. Whatever, I could live with it. I enjoy fine wine but will take any old plonk rather than nothing.

  (In the desert, we boy soldiers made a horrible wine out of raisins and cut-up citrus, with bread- making yeast. I still can’t look at raisins.)

  There was a lot of floor space beyond the pantry, which took up less than a quarter of the storage warehouse. The rest was a combination of replacements for things we knew would wear out, like clothes, and tools and raw materials for fabricating things we hadn’t predicted needing.

  Like weapons, I supposed. We made a point of saying that the mission was peaceful and unarmed. But when I floated through the warehouse and its large semisentient machine shop, I saw that it wouldn’t take much inventiveness or skill to put together individual projectile and laser weapons and small bombs.

  It was unlikely that any conventional weapon would have a non-trivial effect on the Others. But they might not be the only enemies out there. Sooner or later, we’d have to talk about that. I would just as soon not be the one to bring it up, though.

  All that stuff waiting for something to go wrong made me wonder whether we might have traded in one of our xenologists, or even a spy, for a gifted tinkerer. We had engineers in a couple of flavors, and smart machines to do their bidding. But could any of those engineers take a blade to a piece of wood and carve a useful propeller out of it? An oar? I could, of course. But that’s not like having someone who would say, “You don’t need a propeller. This is what you need.”

  I added a frozen cherry pie to the basket and a quart of something supposedly resembling ice cream. By the time I got to the kitchen, everybody was relaxing with a drink in the dining room or the study. Moonboy was intently playing the piano, silent with earphones, studying a projected score. Snowbird was standing by the small bookshelf, studying one of the few physical books we’d brought along.

  Had to get used to their standing all the time. There are no social signals in their posture that I can recognize. When are they relaxing? Does the term have any meaning to them?